Binna Choi

Day 3: New Perspectives on Climate and Commonality

Perspective 7 – 7 November 2021

Binna Choi, Director, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Abstract

What Does it Mean to Art-Institute while Unlearning to Practice the Commons and Maintaining an Ecosystem?

Unlearning for the purpose of cultivating the culture of the commons, whose principles of co-managing resources involve care, cooperation, equity, plurality, and sustainability, is a process of defamiliarizing what you’ve known to learn anew. The knowledge under question includes your knowledge of art. For an art institution, this process of unlearning poses an existential question: what art do you value, and how do you care, support, and share it? Nothing can be taken for granted, while there seems to be no time to dwell on the question(s). Learning new and practicing the commons actually being geared towards an ecosystem, however, ways to make existential shifts open up, and you keep walking[JW1] .

Biography

Binna Choi is the director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht (www.casco.art), where she engages with both its artistic program and the organizational and (de)instituting practice as her curatorial and collaborative art practice. Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills with the Outsiders, Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) with Annette Krauss and the Casco team, and Unmapping Eurasia with You Mi[JW2] are some of her recent or ongoing curatorial projects, alongside the process of restructuring and rearticulating the institution itself with the Casco team, the annual Assembly for commoning art institutions (since 2018) and other infrastructural projects under development. There, earlier, she conceived a long-term trans-disciplinary project Grand Domestic Revolution (2010–2012) and the multi-faceted program Composing the Commons (2013–2016), which includes exhibitions such as New Habits (2014) and We Are the Time Machines: Time and Tools for Commoning (2016), commissions for new works and network-engagement like Arts Collaboratory and Cluster. Furthermore, Choi is a member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt[JW3] , Cologne, where in 2020, in close collaboration with Christian Nyampeta, she curated Gwangju: Lessons Over the 18 May Democratic Uprising[JW4] and took it to the Asia Culture Center as part of the MaytoDay project by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. In 2016, she was a curator for the 11th Gwangju Biennale. She also serves as an advisor to the Afield network and MARCH journal, and is a board member for GALAS (Green Art Lab Alliance) Support.